Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Coincidence

There’s a nice little meme that’s been playing
Facebook, something along the lines of “Check out the weather, watch the
sequestration go, notice how the pope resigned—YIKES!Who’s been playing with the TARDIS?”(No pun on “Who” intended, I’m sure.)The meme plays off the natural human tendency
to go into panic mode when events of a certain rare kind coincide.At times like these we’re wired to suspect—or
at a minimum, in this ironic age, to jest about—conspiracies as if they were
real.

Some scientists consider our conspiracy antenna as leftovers
of our early ancestors’ defense mechanisms against predators.I prefer to think they are the leftovers of superstition
in a defiantly unsusperstitious world.Back in the good old days when Socrates had a daemon, the household its
lares or brownie, and the rivers their naiads—or, if you are going to be
insistently correct about it, when angels and demons hung around—people could
take coincidences as they came, as oddities, but oddities with a rationale
behind them.Now that modern unbelief
has placed supernatural explanations culturally out of bounds, we are left with
human superstitions.The weather you
see?It’s the United Nations, or the
CIA, or that weird group you read about on that guy’s website that really makes
sense if you think about …

No, actually.The
brownies made much more sense.

We mock these conspiracy theories, and rightly so; but they
fill what seems to be a necessary psychological gap that the acceptance of the
supernatural fitted much more naturally and less harmfully.That is no argument, to be sure, for the
reality of the supernatural; but it does point out a weakness inherent in the
modern thought system.Exile the
invisible?Nice thought if you can think
it.